Free (20/20)A Peaceful Retirement by Miss Read Page B

without her muddling about.'
    'Thank you, Mrs Pringle,' I said humbly.
    Bob Willet appeared one evening that week, bearing some fine eating apples.
    'They're good keepers,' he assured me. 'Lovely flavour.'
    1 complimented him on such fine specimens, but he halted me in mid-flow of thanks and admiration.
    'They're my neighbour's. New chap's just moved in. Nice enough, but don't know a thing about gardening. A townee, you see.'
    'He'll learn, I expect.'
    Bob looked gloomy, and puffed out his walrus moustache in a great sigh.
    'I doubt it. Do you know he's bin and dug up a great patch by the back door for what he calls "a car-port". It was the only bit of ground there as grew a decent onion. Enough to break your heart. I told him so when the cement-mixer arrived. D'you know what he said?'
    'What?'
    'He said there was plenty of onions in the shops! The shops!' added Bob in disgust.
    'He may learn.'
    'Never! He just don't have no interest in living things. He drives up to London every day. I'm fair sorry for him really. I offered to prune his fruit trees when the time comes. He was polite, and all that, but it's plain he don't care a button for them fine old apples he's got there. Fred Pringle's granny used to get first prize at the Horticultural Show every year with them russets. Still, to speak fair, he did say he'd advise me about investing my money.'
    Bob gave an ironic laugh.
    'I told him there was not much hope of that. Funny thing is though, I can't help liking the chap. He's so strange, you know. Like a foreigner.'
    He departed soon after, leaving me to ponder on his words.

    'Like a foreigner' Bob had said, and, of course, he was. Bob Willet was a countryman as had all his forbears been. If you plucked Bob from his green garden and dropped him in the arid wastes of a city he would wither as surely as a plant in the same circumstances.
    I remember him once saying to me: "When I gets twizzled up inside, I goes down to the vegetable plot and earths up the celery.'
    It was this close affinity with the land that gave him his strength and sanity. That's what people missed in the vast urban places where most had to live and work.
    It went against Bob's grain to see that cement laid over the best onion bed in Fairacre. It flew in the face of nature, and in his bones Bob rebelled.
    Of course, even in my time things had changed in Fairacre and Beech Green. Almost every household now had a car, if not two. Ease of travel meant that the breadwinner could leave his renovated country cottage and take the nearby motorway to work, leaving the village practically deserted during the day.
    When I first took up my headship at Fairacre school the village was an agricultural settlement, as it had been for centuries. The majority of the people worked for the three or four farmers and landowners as farm labourers, carters, ploughmen, shepherds and so on. There were still one or two farm horses in regular use.
    Over the years farming had changed. A farmer with only two or three men could cope with the work, thanks to modern machinery and the change in farming methods.
    The cottages were bought by strangers and refurbished. These were the people who were commuters, arriving home too late, and probably too tired, to do much gardening or to take an interest in village affairs.
    No wonder Bob Willet looked upon them as strangers. But how good to know that he 'couldn't help liking the chap!'

    I was still thinking about the changes to village life as I chopped up Tibby's supper. Soon all the old people who remembered that way of life would be gone, and what a pity it was that so much valuable social history will have vanished.
    Perhaps everyone should keep a diary, I thought, putting down the saucer, or even keep the monthly parish magazine for future generations to study.
    I recalled the tales that Dolly Clare had told me about her way of life as a child in this very cottage that I had inherited. Tales of mammoth washdays, fetching water from the